Bending Spoons to Buy Vimeo for $1.38B in Cash

Bending Spoons to Acquire Vimeo in $1.38B Cash Deal

Vimeo announced an agreement Wednesday to be bought by Bending Spoons, one of Europe’s largest mobile app developers, in an all-cash transaction valued at about $1.38 billion. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2025, pending customary conditions and regulatory approvals, after which Vimeo will be delisted.

Bending Spoons’ CEO Luca Ferrari said the buyer plans to invest heavily across Vimeo’s consumer and enterprise offerings, add AI-enabled features, and ramp up performance and reliability in priority markets including the U.S. Vimeo’s CEO Philip Moyer echoed optimism, saying the move will unlock focus and growth across Self-Serve, OTT/Streaming, and Enterprise segments.

The announcement also revives a familiar tension: Bending Spoons has a pattern of aggressive cost-cutting and product changes after acquisitions. After buying Evernote in 2022, the company moved operations and cut staff, shut older clients, and restricted the free tier. WeTransfer’s post-acquisition history included mass layoffs and limits on free transfers.

For Vimeo stakeholders—creators, enterprise customers, and employees—those precedents are important context. Promises of investment and new AI features could mean faster innovation and better scale, but they also raise questions about product continuity, pricing, and workforce changes.

Vimeo spun out from IAC in 2021 and has since seen its market value plunge—losing nearly 90% of value—which pushed leadership to consider strategic options. Bending Spoons had reportedly eyed a takeover as early as March 2024.

What stakeholders should watch

• Regulatory approvals and timing: deal must clear antitrust and cross-border reviews before Q4 2025 closing.
• Product roadmap changes: watch which features get prioritized, deprecated, or re-priced—especially free-tier limits.
• Workforce and operations shifts: expect potential redundancies, relocations, or consolidation into European operations.
• Enterprise contracts and SLAs: customers should seek clarity on long-term commitments for uptime, privacy, and support.

Why this matters and how to prepare

An acquisition of this size reshapes product strategy and customer expectations. For creators, short-term instability could affect monetization and distribution. For businesses using Vimeo for streaming and enterprise video, the priority should be contractual clarity and contingency planning. For employees, the deal highlights the need to understand retention packages and relocation policies.

Analytically, the balance is between Bending Spoons’ promise of investment and the operational reality of integrating a large platform. Rapid investment can accelerate features like AI-powered editing, recommendation engines, and streaming reliability—but only if accompanied by thoughtful migration plans and customer protections.

QuarkyByte’s approach would be to map scenarios, quantify customer churn and revenue impact under different product and pricing changes, and design communications that protect enterprise SLAs and creator trust. Companies should prepare playbooks for contractual negotiations, data portability, and staged feature rollouts to prevent sudden disruptions.

Expect an intense period of diligence, regulatory review, and public scrutiny between now and the expected close. For users and customers, the smart move is to inventory dependencies, secure contractual protections, and demand clarity on roadmap and pricing. For investors, the deal is a bet that a private owner can extract value from a public company whose market has already punished it.